The Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University has acquired and you, all future tense, leak through (2023) by Chicago-based Vietnamese American artist Antonius-Tín Bui through the museum’s annual student-led acquisition program. Selected by the 2025–2026 cohort of Block Museum Student Associates (BMSAs), the work joins the museum’s collection as part of an ongoing initiative that invites undergraduate students into the process of researching and recommending the acquisition of an artwork to the museum’s collection.
Born to Vietnamese refugee parents in the Bronx, New York, Bui (b. 1992) brings a deeply personal perspective shaped by their experiences navigating layered identities as a queer, genderfluid Vietnamese American. They earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2016 and have since exhibited work at venues including Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago, Various Small Fires in Dallas, and the Lawndale Art Center in Houston. Their work is held in collections including the Mint Museum, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, and the New York Historical Society.
A student-led process
This year’s student acquisition process began with a shortlist of twenty-four artists researched by curatorial interns Muyang Chen and Aja Frazier under the 2025–2026 theme “Chicago.” Artists were required to be Chicago-based or represented by a Chicago gallery, have work available within the acquisition budget, and create works on paper. A BMSA research team consisting of Laurel Anderson, Aranza Noriega, Renato de Souza Elisanio, and Tyree Walton narrowed the list to eight artists before the full cohort selected four finalists for deeper consideration.
After selecting Bui as the final artist under consideration, the cohort reviewed four available works through gallery visits, group discussions, and a Zoom conversation with the artist. The students also met with Professor Joshua Chambers-Letson from Northwestern’s Department of Performance Studies to discuss the work’s potential for cross-disciplinary teaching.
“The BMSAs were drawn to the work’s engagement with Southeast Asian cultural histories, its challenge to Western museum conventions, its use of hand-cut paper, as well as its reimagining of vessels as sites of creativity,” the students wrote in their acquisition justification. “Overall, Bui’s and you, all future tense, leak through (2023) offers rich possibilities for teaching, research, and critical dialogue across Northwestern’s campus.”
About the selected work
Bui is a polydisciplinary artist whose practice moves fluidly between hand-cut paper, performance, dance, soft sculpture, and community engagement. Their work often explores Vietnamese, Asian, AAPI, and LGBTQ+ identities not as fixed categories, but as layered and evolving relationships to ancestry, community, and selfhood.
In and you, all future tense, leak through, Bui translates the visual language of traditional Asian ceramics into hand-cut paper, creating what the BMSAs described as “a meditation on fragility, memory, and survival.” The work depicts a face emerging from a fractured ceramic vessel rendered in layered cobalt blue patterns inspired by 14th- and 15th-century Vietnamese ceramics. The composition is cut entirely by hand from a single sheet of paper using an X-Acto knife, with traces of the original colorful drawing materials still visible beneath layers of spray paint.
During a Zoom conversation with the students, Bui described their interest in Vietnamese ceramic vessels as dynamic objects that “hold and transmit memory, both historically and functionally.” During the selection process, the students’ research expanded outward from the work’s materiality and imagery into broader questions of colonial exchange, migration, queer visibility, ritual practice, and cultural survival.
The title of the work is borrowed from “Alternate Endings,” a poem by writer Jenny Xie from her collection The Rupture Tense. The final lines of the poem read:
“When winter comes around, pages fall open.
And you, all future tense, leak through.”
Reflecting on the work during the cohort’s presentation to The Block Acquisition Committee, BMSA Aranza Noriega Blondet returned to the question embedded in its title: “You can’t hold identity in place… That idea of leakage, of being broken is central, but then — are you really broken, or are you just changing?”
Connections across the collection and campus
For the BMSAs, the work’s themes resonated strongly with The Block’s mission of interdisciplinary inquiry and teaching through art. In their justification, students connected Bui’s work to objects already in the museum’s collection by artists including Shan Goshorn, Chitra Ganesh, Tseng Kwong Chi, Leonard Suryajaya, and Derrick Woods-Morrow, drawing connections around material culture, archival histories, performance, queerness, and representation within museum spaces.
Students also identified a wide range of curricular connections across Northwestern, including courses in Asian American Studies, Anthropology, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Performance Studies, and English. Faculty whose teaching and research align with the work include Joshua Chambers-Letson, Michelle Huang, Raymond San Diego, Jillana Enteen, and Hirokazu Miyazaki.
The acquisition reflects the Block Museum Student Associates program’s emphasis on collaborative research, close looking, and sustained conversation around the role of art within the university. Through the process, students engaged not only with contemporary art and collecting practices, but also with broader questions about cultural memory, identity, visibility, and how museums can support more expansive and inclusive histories.
The 2025–2026 Student Acquisition was completed by Laurel Anderson, Ethan Bledsoe, Keya Soni Chaudhuri, Renato de Souza Elisanio, Sam Habashy, Symone Harris, Ashley Kim, Isaac Lageschulte, Faith Magiera, Tori Montinola, Alexa Murphy, Leila Murray, Aranza Noriega Blondet, Vanya Saksena, Emily Shen, Lily Shen, Tyree Walton, and Serina Wood.
and you, all future tense, leak through is on view in The Block Museum’s Leffmann Gallery during the Fall/Winter 2026–2027 season.
